5000 Rials Provisional Issue, Type 2

After the February 1979 revolution, the new Islamic government needed to quickly disavow the Shah's imagery on circulating banknotes without the time or infrastructure to commission entirely new designs. The solution was blunt: apply an overprint directly onto existing De La Rue-printed imperial issues, obscuring the offending vignettes while preserving the note's functional value. Three signature combinations were used across the provisional series as the central bank cycled through governors and ministers during a period of acute institutional instability — Ansari replaced by Yeganeh, Khoshkish stepping in for Mehran — each transition reflecting a different phase of post-revolutionary reorganization.

The overprint itself varies slightly in ink density and registration across examples, a known inconsistency in this type.